Nanotechnology used in war on superbugs

LONDON, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- British scientists are using a nanomechanical approach to investigate vancomycin, one of a few antibiotics used to combat increasingly resistant infections.

The University College London researchers, led by Dr. Rachel McKendry and Professor Gabriel Aeppli, developed ultra-sensitive probes capable of providing new insight into how antibiotics work.

In the study, McKendry, Joseph Ndieyira, Moyu Watari and colleagues coated cantilever arrays -- tiny levers no wider than a human hair -- with mucopeptides from bacterial walls to examine the process that ordinarily takes place in the body when vancomycin binds itself to the surface of bacteria. They discovered that as the antibiotic attaches itself, it generates a surface stress on the bacteria that can be detected by a tiny bending of the levers.

That finding, said the researchers, suggests stress contributes to the disruption of the cell walls and the breakdown of the bacteria.

"There has been an alarming growth in antibiotic-resistant hospital 'superbugs' such as MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci," said McKendry. "This is a major global health problem and is driving the development of new technologies to investigate antibiotics and how they work."

The study is reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.